Our methodology
What a TrueConform scan actually does — and, just as important, what it can't prove.
How the scan works
Every scan loads your page in a real headless Chromium browser (the fully rendered page, after JavaScript runs) and executes axe-core — the open-source accessibility engine built by Deque Systems and used by professional auditors, Google Lighthouse, and Microsoft Accessibility Insights. We test against WCAG 2.1 and 2.2, levels A and AA — the standard referenced by the European Accessibility Act (EN 301 549) and used in ADA cases.
Whole-site scans crawl your key pages and aggregate the results. Every issue we report includes which WCAG criterion it violates, why it matters for real users, and how to fix it.
How the grade is calculated
Your 0–100 score is severity-weighted: critical issues (e.g. a checkout button screen readers can't announce) cost far more than minor ones, and repeated instances of the same issue have diminishing weight — so one template bug repeated 50 times doesn't drown out everything else. The letter grade (A–F) maps from that score. The same scoring runs in our web scanner, browser extension, and PDF reports, so grades are always comparable.
- Missing alt text, form labels, button/link names
- Insufficient colour contrast
- Broken ARIA usage, duplicate IDs, missing document language/titles
- Keyboard traps in common patterns, focus-visibility basics
- Roughly 30–40% of WCAG issues by type — and a larger share of the ones that trigger complaints and lawsuits, since missing alt text and unlabeled controls are the most common failures found in practice (WebAIM's yearly survey of the top million homepages consistently shows these dominate).
- Whether alt text is meaningful (a photo of a red dress captioned "image123.jpg" vs "Red midi dress")
- Whether the logical reading and focus order actually makes sense
- Whether complex widgets (menus, carousels, date-pickers) work with a real screen reader
- Whether error messages, instructions, and flows are understandable
- Cognitive accessibility, video captions quality, and many Level AA judgment calls
This is why no tool — ours included — can "certify" your site as compliant, and why the W3C itself states that automated tools cannot determine accessibility on their own; human judgment is required. Anyone who sells you a badge or an overlay that claims otherwise is selling snake oil: courts and regulators look at whether real users can use your site, not whether a widget is installed.
What we recommend (and sell)
- Free scan — find the automatically-detectable issues. Fixing these eliminates the most common, most-litigated failures.
- Monitoring ($29/mo) — sites change constantly; monitoring re-scans on a schedule and alerts you when your grade regresses.
- Expert-reviewed audit ($499) — a human expert adds manual keyboard, focus-order and screen-reader checks on top of the deep scan, delivered as a prioritized remediation plan. See a sample report (PDF).
Who we are
TrueConform is built and operated by Pilotmain. Contact us any time at support@pilotmain.com — accessibility feedback is treated as a priority bug (see our own accessibility statement, generated by dogfooding our own scanner).